After You've Gone
by vlalekat
Summary: MacCready tries to deal with the reality of losing someone you care for very deeply. Warnings for assisted suicide, terminal illness.


After You've Gone

Notes: I wrote this because I was trying to cope with some stuff. I'm sorry.

* * *

 _After the years we've been together  
Through joy and tears, all kinds of weather.  
Someday blue and downhearted,  
You'll long to be with me right back where you started  
After I'm gone, after I'm gone away._

You're not supposed to go slow in the wasteland. You die fast; there's a raider attack, a deathclaw, maybe a pack of ferals. Super mutants smash your head in, or you get into a firefight defending your settlement and friendly fire gets you. Maybe the Institute sends out a synth patrol and one of their lasers catches you right under the arm, burns you to a crisp. Perhaps you're fishing and mirelurks pop up out of the ground, snapping their claws and rushing you.

It can happen any time: in the dead of night, or when you've just gotten out of the shower, or when you're sitting down to dinner. It can happen in any number of times and ways, and always when you're not prepared.

It can happen when you settle down for the night in an abandoned subway station, baby in your lap and your beautiful wife drooling all over your shoulder.

For example.

One way it's not supposed to happen is slowly. You're not supposed to die by shades, fading out a little each day until you're nothing but a pale imitation of the person you once were. You're supposed to go down with your weapon in your hand, or at least hollering your head off at whatever's coming at you. You're supposed to be able to run, to fight, to _try._

Watching her die like this – bedridden and frail - is a small-scale tragedy.

She's lived for more than two hundred years;. It doesn't seem possible for her to die because her own body has betrayed her. Yet she lies in the narrow bed on the ground floor of Home Plate, drowning in the fluid in her lungs. Her breath is raspy, rattling; each one seems to take an hour, and then she breathes out again.

Sometimes she's lucid; other times she drifts between lifetimes. There are times when she knows who he is, when she asks after Duncan, after Shaun, after Imogen. Other times she raves, screaming for Nate, screaming about the bombs. Still others she speaks in broken Latin, or asks to see the doctor. She says he can't keep her here, it's a violation of her rights. As if she isn't in the bed in her own home. As if this isn't the best care that he – and the Commonwealth – can get for her.

When he walks through town, no one will quite meet his eye. They all know – Dr. Sun isn't much of a gossip, but what the vault dweller does will always be news. One day he caught Piper trying to pry information out of the doc and he'd never been so close to slugging that fool woman as he was then. Since then, the story has stayed out of the paper, even though Piper comes every couple days to talk to her, to listen, or to sit by her bedside in vigil.

Mac's killed a lot of people in his thirty years, but he's never seen one take so long to die.

At first, they'd just thought it was the flu. A little bug, and with her so weak after the baby was born, it was to be expected. But then Dr. Sun managed to get his hands on a big machine – there's no remembering what it was called, but it had a bunch of letters for a name – and that's when they found the tumors. He hadn't been able to see them in the images the doc produced, but when she saw them, she gasped. There'd been tears in her eyes.

It had taken too long for him to understand why. When she'd finally gotten through to him, translating for the doctor, there'd been a rushing sound in his ears that made it almost impossible for him to make sense of the words.

He'd refused to believe it. There'd be another option, a serum or a cure. There had to be an operation, or _something._

And Dr. Sun had operated. He'd gone in and taken out everything he could. When he'd finished, the doc was sweating and flushed and visibly frustrated. He'd tried to explain what he'd seen, but it was a couple days before she felt up to hearing it and explaining it to Mac, who'd been unable to believe it.

 _Metastasized,_ the doc had said, and he hadn't known what that meant.

"It means it's spread," she'd explained, taking one of his hands in her own and squeezing it. "It's gone from my ovaries to my lungs. Next stop, if it isn't there already, is my brain. Then things'll really go downhill."

There'd been the roaring again, the sound of air so loud in his ears he couldn't think. Couldn't process.

He'd tried again. He went to every hospital he could get to, leaving her with the kids even though he knew she was too sick to really care for them. Duncan and Shaun could help with the baby, he told himself. They would help her take it easy.

But he was gone too long; when he came home again, she'd lost so much weight he almost didn't recognize her. It was almost impossible to reconcile the sad, scared creature before him with the vibrant woman he'd met fresh out of the vault, a scrape across her cheek the only sign that she was even human and not some fever dream come to life out of an old spank mag.

Except for her eyes; her eyes were the same.

That night after the kids were in bed, she'd collapsed on the couch beside him.

"I don't have much longer," she'd said. He didn't want to believe her; she was eternal, a flame. She would always be here.

"What about-"

"I'm telling you." She'd put a hand over his; hers was thin and fragile as a bird's wing. When she'd squeezed, he barely felt it. He could see all the muscles working through her papery skin. "I've already outlived my own time."

"I don't know what I'll do without you." He didn't think he could stand to lose another wife. It was his turn to go, he'd thought petulantly.

"I suppose you'll have to find out," she'd said, leaning into him. Never a big woman, it occurred to him now that she was no larger than Duncan. With his arm around her, she'd looked even smaller than he'd realized. Her shoulder blades had been sharp, pronounced.

For a time she'd drowsed. He'd run his fingers through her hair and waited; there was no point in rushing her.

"When the time comes, I want you to let me go. I don't want to suffer any longer than I have to."

That had brought him out of his stupor. He'd done everything he could to avoid thinking about this.

"But-"

"No buts, Mac. I need you to help me if I can't help myself."

He'd wanted to protest that perhaps he could still find something, could still turn over some previously-unseen rock and be able to cure her. But she'd snuggled closer to him, and instead he'd pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

"There must be some other option," he'd tried.

"I don't think there's time." She'd wheezed then, a choking gasp as she sucked air in. She'd coughed and spit into a handkerchief, and coughed again. For a moment he'd spared a thought to the hundreds of hospitals dotting the landscape. If this had happened before the war, they probably could have saved her. He'd never have met her – might never have existed if things had gone that way instead – but she would have been okay. She would have lived.

The unfairness of it made him want to scream, but all he did was pull her a little tighter, so close her bones almost rattled.

"You promise?"

His voice, promising that he would do whatever she wanted, echoes loudly in his head these days. Sometimes it sounds sympathetic, full of love and wistfulness. Other times, there's a note of bravado to it; in still others it mocks him. As if he'll have the courage when the time comes to cut her loose instead of clinging to her as he's always done.

The syringes of Med-X in his hand gleam dully inside their plastic wrappers. He still sometimes thinks of sneaking out to the research facilities – there's enough of them around – to see if there's anything there, but he never does. Maybe he used up his freebie on Duncan, and much as he loves her, he can't regret that. Or maybe he just doesn't want to miss her last moment.

There's the rattle again, of her breath going out. The wheeze of it going in.

Is this the right time?

Perhaps he'll never know.


End file.
